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After 24 Years, Awaiting End to the Silence

A senior lawyer for New York City complained last week that “The Central Park Five,” a documentary film on the Central Park jogger case, was a “one-sided” version of events.

This was high-grade chutzpah, like the plea for mercy from a man who murders his parents because he is now an orphan.

If there were any shortage of viewpoints in the film, the city lawyer had only herself and her colleagues to thank: they blocked interviews of any prosecutors or detectives involved in the conviction of five teenage boys for a terrible crime that, an investigation later found, they most likely had nothing to do with.

Which leads to a larger question.

For the past decade, the city has been fighting a lawsuit by the five young men.

“The case is not about whether the teens were wrongly convicted,” said Elizabeth Thomas, a spokeswoman for the city’s corporation counsel, Michael A. Cardozo. “It’s about whether prosecutors and police deliberately engaged in misconduct.”

That question surely is at the radioactive core of the jogger case which, even 24 years later, glows with poison.

That makes it all the more intriguing that the city resists the disclosure of records of how prosecutors and investigators conducted themselves.

In April 1989, after hours of interrogation, five teenage boys implicated themselves in the rape and near murder of a jogger in Central Park. Their accounts were wrong about when, where and how the crime had happened. Weak as their statements were, uncorroborated as they may have been by any physical evidence, the “confessions” nevertheless seemed to be the only explanations for what had happened.

Except that there was another one, far more plausible, that was kept quiet for more than a decade.

Just two days before the jogger was attacked, a man named Matias Reyes raped and beat a woman in the same area of Central Park. He was identified through a sketch and quick detective work, but there was no follow-up. So he remained on the loose, and for months, continued to rape, maim and kill women around the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Finally, he was caught not by the police, but by a building porter.

He confessed to a series of crimes, though not the ones in Central Park.

In 2002, Mr. Reyes came forward and said that he alone had attacked the jogger, and he admitted to the crime that had taken place two days earlier.

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Mr. Reyes provided everything that was missing from the case against the boys: physical proof in the form of DNA evidence; a credible version of the attack consistent with the trail left by the attacker and items stolen from the jogger; and a stark history of extraordinarily violent sexual crimes.

After the woman attacked in the park two days before the jogger had recovered, she left the city. Nevertheless, detectives had Mr. Reyes’s name.

Neither the details about that crime nor the name of the chief suspect were provided to lawyers representing five boys charged in a similar case.

One possibility is simple blundering; another is that it was intentional, to make sure the trials of the Central Park Five were not distracted by a different suspect. Whatever the reason, to this day, the city maintains a cloak of silence about those events.

As part of the current lawsuit, the city has turned over records from 1989 of that investigation, and other reports done in 2002. When lawyers for The New York Times recently sought to have them unsealed, the city refused. There was more to the story, Philip R. DePaul, a city lawyer argued, and disclosing the information “will likely unfairly skew The Times’ reporting on this complex and collateral issue.”

Hmm. The city recently tried, unsuccessfully, to subpoena outtakes from “The Central Park Five,” the documentary film it complained about. It was made by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns. (The city also demanded to know how much was paid to people interviewed for the film, including me. Answer: $00.00.)

As for the case of Mr. Reyes and his Central Park rapes, the city argued that there was another compelling reason the records should not be made public. Revealing them “may well cause irreparable harm to the victim” of the earlier rape by disclosing her identity, Mr. DePaul argued.

Of course, charging the wrong people for crimes protected no one. After 24 years, it’s time the city came clean on how the real criminal got away.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on March 1, 2013, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: After 24 Years, Awaiting End To the Silence. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe